Homestead Introduction

Not every host offers site building features. Not every site building company offers great hosting. Homestead offers both. Founded in 1996, the company specializes in pre-built websites with features like hundreds of customizable templates, e-commerce features, professional stock images, and marketing tools.

Support

Homestead offers premium level assistance with all accounts. Support can be reached via toll-free number, Monday through Friday, 6 AM to 5:30 PM PST. Live chat support is available during the same hours, and on weekends from 7 AM to 4 PM.

Features

The three tiers of Homestead pricing packages are suited for various sizes of websites.

Website statistics

SiteBuilder; build websites without coding

Hundreds of customizable templates

More than 1 million royalty-free images

30-day free trial

All three support options

Starter

This very affordable plan is perfect for freelancers and individuals.

25 MB storage

5 GB monthly bandwidth

Five Web pages

One site

Domain name for an extra fee

Email address also extra

Business

This plan includes a few more features than Starter. It’s great for businesses who need more than one site and just a few pages.

5 GB storage

100 GB monthly bandwidth

100 web pages

Three sites

One domain name

Five email addresses

Optional SimpleStore; eCommerce site builder, listing up to 100 products

Business Plus

This robust plan is perfect for medium businesses and eCommerce sites who must accommodate more traffic than the Business plan.

Optional SimpleStore; eCommerce site builder, listing up to 100 products

WebListings included; your business included in Homestead’s directory, plus submitted regularly to more than 150 Web directories, such as Google Maps.

Design consultation

Free setup

*When hosts describe anything as “unlimited,” it is typically boundless except in cases of abuse. A user may be charged a penalty or be required to subscribe to a more robust package if they are overburdening the servers.

Additional Features

In order to offer you services you may need to get noticed on the Web, Homestead offers a few optional add-on services for an additional monthly fee.

Homestead Reviews by Our Community

Most Helpful Reviews

Frank Petersocfruit.com

Sep 11, 2018

I wanted to get our club away from Homestead. Some other people in the club were resistant to change. They were resistant to change in itself.

So I had homestead itself help me. I asked the people against the change to go to our site hosted by homestead and copy some text and email it back to me. I said I would stop requesting the change if they did this little task.

After attempting this, they now fully supported my change to new host. Many now wanted to help me as they saw one of the many issues with the host pages. After we changed to a new host we were able to do many things to decrease the workload of people.

The reason I was supported::>? On the homestead pages, when you highlight text sections – the order highlighted is the order added regardless of position on the page. I have never saw any other site do this.

It was so bad It was easier to retype a paragraph than attempt to copy and paste the content. ( I would highlight a paragraph in the middle of a page and then title and navigation links would also highlight. I am not making this up. Also, I noticed one person had two 5 star posts supporting homestead.

I think He works for homestead. I cannot understand anyone who has used anything else cane think homestead is a good option. How was he able to post 2 reviews??

I am a self taught webdesigner. I proudly dont know html or flash and don’t want to. I create great sites that my clients can update themselves.

I have used: Weebly, Homestead, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, etc. By far Homestead is my favorite. While you can start with a template, the ability to customize and go free form are great.

Caveat: the more talented a designer is, the more fully they can use the full range of Homestead’s tools. I love the slideshow option which is eye catching. I love that am not bound by any limitations of templates.

I like that it has a powerful sitebuilder tool for customizing and is pretty intuitive. Though updating is a bit more involved than updating Weebly. I have seen the low reviews of Homestead here.

I suspect part of it is that the designers may not take full advantage of Homestead. I like Weebly best for simpler websites. The limitations of Weebly software that is influenced so much by templates is that you have little gadgets you move around — for pictures, text, videos, etc — but they need to be inserted into pre-designed templates.

I am very creative guy and free form appeals to me. I also write novels and am a pro cuddler. Here is my Homestead site: www.DwightOkita.com

Since Windows 10 came out, Homestead‘s Site Builder hasn’t been fully fixed to be compatible. They have a BS work around where you have to reinstall Microsoft’s J# software to get Site Builder to work. They don’t seem to care enough to fix the problem. Been waiting for almost Three years for them to fix it!

I’ve been with homestead since 1998, everyone was learning in those days ☺

I still use Homestead, however their support is nothing anymore, not for anyone that
is a novice. Seldom do I ever need support, last time was maybe 2-3 years ago. A few weeks ago the homestead editor on my laptop, developed the bad habit of not connecting to the internet, after exhausting of all my trouble shooting skills I’ve acquired the past 40 years I turned to homestead support.

I get a form letter with a bunch of links, with instructions to read all the information in the links. And that is why for the average novice I say Homestead is not very good anymore

I hired them to build and promote placement of my website in January 2018, it is May and the site just went live. It has been a nightmare from start to finish. First, their web designers do not listen to the customer’s needs and requests but do what they want and they do not know what they are doing.

They mixed up the content so the pages no longer made sense, none of the links, including the one to click for my company phone number, work, they have a customer inquiry form that goenowherere, they lost some of my content, including my customer reviews and the format does not conform to mobile devices, which was my primary reason for using their service. And, I have been paying for thnon existentnt service for 4 months. I plan to file a complaint with the BBB.

I joined homestead 6 years ago had most of my Business on homestead… Its just the uploading time of homestead is a 5-6 secs, Can you believe it. When you call support, They say its amazing, All good,

Since homestead was bought by NetFirms it has been going down literally I will never , Ever recommend them….New Software is massively slow, application is very heavy, uploading time seriously damages……when homestead was with inuit we saw amazing results, good business for me, Now I have wasted so much money with these guys……And Then they were super late with Cell phone adaptation introducing new software in dec, while before We all were being penalise by google for not having cell phone sites, They used another 3rd party hosts for cell applications like duda, …which was a nightmare…..I don’t know but Wix or some new ones are better,

Homestead Sucks! I do not recommend purchasing a domain name through Homestead Ever! I am a developer and I have spent many, many hours trying to gain access to a clients domain name through Homestead.

Everytime I send in the information their compliance team requests, I receive the same confusing, generic email back. They do not respond with any real information and when I call them to find out the actual status, the customer service just regurgitates the same message. They do not explain what they have receive, whether it is sufficient or what else they need.

Instead, customer service says that the compliance team is a different department and they have no control over them. But you can’t talk team or expect a response from them. They set up catch 22’s at every corner to hold your domain ransom.

I think their Business practices are despicable. And I thank the heavens above for GoDaddy.

Homestead has an excellent and easy-to-use web building tool,regular site backups,detailed site reporting,product catalogs and shopping carts.These features make Homestead a perfect place for any small Business or company to sell it’s products and services. The big downside is the lack of support for third-party web-building clients/tools combined with the high priced templates and disk space. Overall,Homestead is solid and reliable but could make a few modifications to their pricing plan.

I have been with Homestead for almost 5 years. My Business has grown like crazy. Unfortunately Homestead has gotten worse and worse by the minute.

It all started when they migrated a new server in last year. Since then it has been one bug after another,. Today my customers cannot even get on my site and there is no one there to help. If I didn’t have so much invested in my site I would move to another hoster.

I had a Domain with Homestead for several years. The website build was great. Easy to use templates and intuitive building process.

After a bit I added a second e-mail address to separate a Business feature and then later another page (these were slight cost increases. I loved it! Then I got an overall cost increase and was not too happy about it but the service was good so I continued.

Then, on New Year’s eve when it was conveniently (for them) to be unable to contact them, my website was pulled down. I went ballistic and called Support but was told that because it was an "Abuse" issue I would have to contact the review team by e-mail (only; no phone) and not until Monday (3 days later). On Monday I sent e-mails from every Other e-mail account I had (since the ones from my Domain would not work) and finally got a reply.

They said that I had "violated their Terms of Service" by offering firearms for sale." Well their TOS say that you cannot Illegally offer firearms for sale but I am a Federally licensed Firearms dealer and a registered business in my State and have City approval so my firearm sales are completely legal. I offered to send them copies of my licenses and their asinine reply was, in effect, "We don’t have the time to verify that you are legally conducting these sales so you must move your Domain."
In other words, even though I WAS in compliance with their TOS they just don’t want to host Firearms retailers but don’t have the balls to say so. I have since found a firearms friendly host and have moved my Domain. Homestead sucks.

Pros

Free trial

Premium support included with all accounts

Value-added features

Cons

Limited bandwidth

No domain included with Starter pack

Minimal storage

The Verdict

This host offers three, direct service plans. All three are competitively priced and include basic Web hosting services. However, Homestead is not a full service hosting company. They specialize in website building and design, with some e-commerce and SEO features.
It is smart to plan ahead for the possibility of moving to a bigger host in the future, so keep in mind exporting websites from a service like Homestead can be complicated. They own the templates you use to design your site, plus the stock images they provide. That said, small businesses and freelancers may find Homestead’s services a good fit when creating a Web presence and building traffic.

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Our writing team comes from all over the world with diverse backgrounds in the arts and sciences. But what links them is their passion for the internet. All together they represent many decades of experience working in all facets of it — from programming and hardware creation to website design and marketing.

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